France
announced Tuesday that it was recognizing the newly formed Syrian rebel
coalition and would consider arming the group, seeking to inject
momentum into a broad Western and Arab effort to build a viable and
effective opposition that would hasten the end of a stalemated civil war
that has destabilized the Middle East. The announcement by President François Hollande made France the first
Western country to fully embrace the new coalition, which came together
this past weekend under Western pressure after days of difficult
negotiations in Doha, Qatar.

The goal was to make an opposition leadership — both inside and outside
the country — representative of the array of Syrian groups pressing for
the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad. Although Mr. Assad is
increasingly isolated as his country descends further into mayhem and
despair after 20 months of conflict, he has survived partly because of
the disagreements and lack of unity among his opponents. Throughout the conflict, the West has taken half measures and been
reluctant to back an aggressive effort to oust Mr. Assad. This appears
to be the first time that Western nations, with Arab allies, are
determined to build a viable opposition leadership that can ultimately
function as a government. Whether it can succeed remains unclear.

Mr. Hollande went beyond other Western pledges of support for the new
Syrian umbrella rebel group, which calls itself the National Coalition
of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. But Mr. Hollande’s
announcement clearly signaled expectations that if the group can
establish political legitimacy and an operational structure inside Syria,
creating an alternative to the Assad family’s four decades in power, it
will be rewarded with further recognition, money and possibly weapons.

“I announce that France recognizes the Syrian National Coalition as the
sole representative of the Syrian people and thus as the future
provisional government of a democratic Syria and to bring an end to
Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” said Mr. Hollande, who has been one of the
Syrian president’s harshest critics. As for weapons, Mr. Hollande said, France had not supported arming the
rebels up to now, but “with the coalition, as soon as it is a legitimate
government of Syria, this question will be looked at by France, but
also by all countries that recognize this government.”

Political analysts called Mr. Hollande’s announcement an important
moment in the Syrian conflict, which began as a peaceful Arab Spring
uprising in March 2011. It was harshly suppressed by Mr. Assad, turned
into a civil war and has left nearly 40,000 Syrians dead, displaced
about 2.5 million and forced more than 400,000 to flee to neighboring
countries, according to international relief agencies. “It’s certainly another page of the story,” Augustus Richard Norton, a
professor of international relations at Boston University and an expert
on Middle East political history, said of the French announcement. “I
think it’s important. But it will be much more important if other
countries follow suit. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.”

Some drew an analogy to France’s leading role in the early days of the
Libyan uprising when it helped funnel aid, and later military support,
to the rebels who had firmly established themselves in eastern Libya and
would later topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. But in Syria, rebels have
not been as organized and have no hold on significant amounts of
territory — at least not enough to create a provisional government that
could resist Mr. Assad’s military assaults. The West has also refused,
so far, to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, which was critical to the
success of the Libyan uprising.

Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, said that the new coalition would have to create a secure
zone in Syria to be successful, and that that step would require support
from the United States, which was instrumental in the negotiations that
led to the group’s creation but has not yet committed to giving it full
recognition. What the French have done, Mr. Tabler said, is significant because they
have started the process of broader recognition, putting pressure on the
group to succeed. “They’ve decided to back this umbrella organization
and hope that it has some kind of political legitimacy and keep it from
going to extremists,” he said. “It’s a gamble. The gamble is that it
will stiffen the backs of the opposition.”